The ‘Elbow Effect’
Its that time again! To make it sound dramatic, records are being ’smashed’ on this blog (today sees its busiest day to date), and its not because I’ve written a clever, insightful technology related post linked to from Techmeme.. Its all because the band Elbow are back on tour.
Back in April of last year I posted a review of an Elbow gig, and a couple days later the set-list for the gig. And every time they tour, those posts get what I consider to be a reasonable number of hits.
Already today, the blog has had 40 new visitors, and during ‘Elbow Touring Season’ it averages around 30 a day. Its not a huge amount, but its much larger than I ever thought would look at this blog.
The set-list post has now received 1,347 hits – that’s more than half the number of visits to this blog. I sometimes wonder whether anyone has stuck around since reading it? Anyone bookmarked me? Added me to your RSS reader? If so, feel free to comment below.
I posted the link partially because I thought it would be useful info for others, but also to see if there was demand for set-lists. At the time, I didn’t know if there were any sites out there dedicated to the task. I thought, if there was demand it might be worth setting up a set-list wiki where people can add setlists to the gigs they’ve been to in order to help others. Given the response to the post, I started putting the plan into action. I got so far, then decided to Google for such a site just in case, and found setlist.fm. As with all the good ideas, someone’s already beaten me to it and done a much better job.
Easy come, easy go.
Java Integer Annoyance in UltraEdit
A colleague in work occasionally comes across the same problem of his Java application failing because he spelt integer with a capital ‘I’ rather than a lowercase i. This was caused by UltraEdit auto correcting it for him each time. Basically it was too clever for its own good. One of the very few flaws of Ultraedit imho.
I did a quick Google to see whether there was an obvious solution for this but couldn’t find one. As I couldn’t find anything, I thought it would be wise to write about the workaround I figured out.
In short, edit the Wordfile so the word ‘Integer’ is no longer considered a keyword for Java. The side effect is the word ‘Integer’ will no longer appear with syntax highlights.
Below is a breakdown of how to achieve this.
This assumes you have a relatively standard ‘wordfile’. It’s quite simple and equally as obvious.
- Open up UltraEdit
- Select Advanced > Configuration > Editor Display > Syntax Highlighting
- Click ‘Open’ – a document should open up in the background.
- Click ‘Cancel’.
- Press ctrl+f and enter “Java” into the search field. Press return and it should find “Java”.
- Now press ctrl+f again and enter “Integer” into the search field. Press enter.
- You might find other instances of Interger (such as BigInteger). You are looking for plain old ‘Integer’. Press F3 until you find it.
- Once you’ve found it, delete it and save the document.
This issue should now stop happening.
Intuitive UI Design Examples
I’m not sure whether there’s actually a name for this, but until someone suggests otherwise I’ll refer to it as ‘Intuitive Design’. For me, what that represents is when a developer almost pre-empts the way you’re going to subconsciously use something by coding for non obvious situations (catchy, no?).
They must think to themselves “I think the user is going to try and do x because s/he thinks it should work that way.”, and I really like it when they do that.
I came across an example over the weekend by Microsoft of all people in Windows Messenger of all applications.
I wanted to send a screenshot to a mate using Messenger. Usually what I do is:
- press the Print Screen key
- open up Paint
- ctrl+v to paste my screenshot
- Save it off
- Locate the file using Explorer
- Drag it on to the chat window with my mate (an example of intuitive design in fact) and it sends the file (that’s providing the app doesn’t get too clever for its own good and decide on my mate’s behalf that he doesn’t really want to risk opening it – it does my head in when MS takes that approach!).
On this occasion though, without really thinking I:
- pressed the Print Screen key
- in the chat window, hit Ctrl+V to paste and as if by magic it sent the screenshot as a file to my mate.
Amazing (in a non-jesus changing water in to wine kind of way)! Over time that could be a time-saver, and to me and my subconscious self makes perfect sense.
So hats off to the MS developer who did that.
Another example is between iTunes and Winamp.
Until recently, I’d have Winamp open at all times on the 2nd monitor. To begin with I use to drag files from Explorer on to Winamp and placed it in the right place on the Playlist. Winamp knew what to do with this content being dragged in (another minor example).
Soon after buying an iPod – and as a result – starting rating things in iTunes, I began to listen to music based on those ratings. Not in a smart-playlist kind of way, but in a “Lets look at this band and pick a song I rated highly/haven’t rated” kind of way.
I dragged the song from iTunes and on to Winamp and quite surprisingly, Winamp lapped it up and added the song the playlist.
For me, that’s another great example of pre-empting what I want to do and how my subconscious self thinks it should be done.
I think this is one area where Web Apps show their (lack-of) age. It will be a while yet before one web app can talk to another without the user having to give it much thought. It will happen though, I don’t doubt it.
Clay Shirky: 2 Interesting Articles
I’ve recently started reading blog posts by a chap called Clay Shirky. He appears to be up there with the likes of Tim O’Reilly (no, not him from Fox News!) in terms of insight into where the Internet is at, and where its going.
Here are a couple of lengthy pieces I’m really pleased I read:
